EVENTS

The air is full of feathers

I can never catch up. You know how that goes.

And I can even less catch up right now because I read one post and then I have to read posts linked in trackbacks and before you know it the afternoon is gone. This will not do! I could have built a cathedral in the time.

I’ll tell you the truth: I’m not reading them to get a better understanding of the scholarship on Jesus. I’m reading them because there’s so much in them that’s funny. That’s also why I’m sharing them with you. Don’t bother with them if you’re interested in Jesus studies, but do if you want a laugh.

The Jesus discussion is an interesting one, but I notice there seems to usually be one group of experts missing in the discussion – fiction writers.

As a fiction writer, I can tell you that there are particular tools a fiction writer uses to make their story interesting and readable, and to persuade the reader to suspend disbelief and pretend along with them. These tools are rampant in the New Testament. They usually aren’t utilized that much by history (though I will admit that in ancient times some of their history gets pretty out there as they try to outdo each other…still…)

Perhaps it’s time to start considering that, when a story reads like fiction, and uses the tools cherished by fiction writers everywhere, it might be time to consider…is it possibly fiction? Intended to be fiction all the time? And then someone took it seriously?

Sort of like my dad taking The DaVinci Code seriously…and all the people I know who cite the Left Behind series as though it is non-fiction. Bleh.

Wow, that Hoffman piece really is a vituperative little rant. The problem is that even if he is able to prove that some mystic rabbi with a name similar to Jesus actually existed, which in itself is going to be difficult given the paucity of the evidence (despite the exorbitantly funded and biased ‘scholarship’ going back almost 2,000 years), he will then have to show that the guy wasn’t just some Bronze Age Ron L. Hubbard.

I’m pretty much uninterested in this. It doesn’t matter one whit whether there was, or was not, an unknown historical person who may heve been named Yeshue bar Yussef. What matters is that the myth of his divinity has been completely exploded. The myth of his “sacrifice” has been completely discredited. The scriptures of his followers shown to be bogus. The story of his ‘resurrection’ a fable. The evidence shown to be totally non-existent. And his current heirs proved to be a bunch of money-laundering, child-raping mobsters……

I know; there’s a lot of that. There’s a whole bunch (or should I be elegant and say coterie) of people who generalize wildly about some mythical beast called FTB when the reality is that it’s a collection of [counts] 33 blogs run by different people. It’s not a Party with party discipline, nor is it a single Beast with 33 heads.

I’ve always thought the Jesus story makes sense, in a way, if you take both the stuff in the Bible and the story of early Christianity and hold them at arms length and sort of squint a bit It’s like those Doomsday cults that don’t get discouraged when the world fails to end, they just change the story a little, believe even more strongly and get really enthusiastic about spreading the word to the unsaved. So, their big hero cult leader didn’t save them from the Romans, but… that’s just because he’s actually saving everybody everywhere in an invisible spiritual way, if they’ll just believe what we tell them! And the way this Jesus guy is described in the Bible, he sounds like prime cult leader material.

The Hoffman rant over at the New Oxonian is unhinged, and really all the effect of the furore is to make me want to sit back on a nice, comfortable sofa with a large supply of popcorn. It’s obvious that the most people who are getting angry about the historicity question have a vested interest in the answer, which is why as Carrier puts it, “I discovered that the field of New Testament studies was so monumentally fucked the task wasn’t as straightforward as I had hoped”. It really seems about as ultimately futile as arguing over whether the invisible, intangible dragon in the garage has one spike on his tail, or two spikes.

FTB isn’t one big blog, it’s a group of 33 separate blogs.
Preaching to the choir – though PZ would probably pay good money for a T-Shirt depicting the bloggers as tentacles.

On the topic at hand I find it funny that Ehrman says no penis nosed statue of Peter exists he actually means No statue of Peter exists whether or not there is such a statue. In which case he should agree with the statement about Jesus should be No fair skinned , blue eyed, virgin born , resurrected Jesus existed.

I find it funny that Ehrman says no penis nosed statue of Peter exists he actually means No statue of Peter exists whether or not there is such a statue. In which case he should agree with the statement about Jesus should be No fair skinned , blue eyed, virgin born , resurrected Jesus existed. –Deepak Shetty

I’m currently reading–well, OK, I’ve just started–Carrier’s book, but not because I’m interested in the historicity of Jesus. I want to see how he applies Bayesian methods to historical analysis.

I’ve never quite understood why non-fundamentalist Christians are so hung up on the historicity question. Do Christian ideas somehow cease to have value if the historicity and/or divinity of Jesus is questioned? I’ve asked moderate believers this question, and almost always get an eye-roll and something along the lines of “You just don’t get it, do you?” Which, of course, I don’t.

Ophelia, I don’t find these feuds funny, I find them sad. I think they’re a waste, so much hostility exchanged between people who have so many interests in common.

I guess I can see how someone would find it all funny. So much energy expended over a chicken.

‘Tis Himself, that Hoffmann feller is an atheist. Granted, he doesn’t always go a long way out of his way to point that out. And the fact that he does often go out of his way to sharply criticize “New Atheists” as if they were a clearly-defined group — are they? or, are you? as the case may be — often leads, not particularly surprisingly, to the misapprehension that he is not an atheist, not even uncapitalized and without the “New.”

And that rant Ophelia linked was not his finest hour.

sailor, I cannot begin to express how uninterested I am in how uninterested people are about whether or not Jesus existed. It amazes me how often people find it necessary to say this. Do you barge into discussions of theoretical math or Impressionism just to tell the participants that the topic of their discussion moves you not a whit? No! Of course you don’t! Such behavior would be bizarre. And it’s bizarre here.

When I find a blog interesting I tend to dig around in the older posts. And I’ve been reading some of Hoffmann’s stuff lately. (I hope saying so doesn’t mean that people around here will go all Donald-Sutherland-at-the-end-of-Invasion-of-the-Body-Snatchers on me. Among those who aren’t already, that is to say.)

There have been a lot of not-his-finest-hour rants. That has to do with organizational needs (and feuds and grudges) probably a good deal more than with his real opinions. It is all pretty sad, you’re right.